The North’s Jim Crow

By Andrew W. Kahrl

Dr. Kahrl studies the history of segregation.

May 27, 2018

Image

CreditCreditChris Kindred

Last month in Philadelphia, a white Starbucks manager summoned police officers to confront a pair of African-American men after one asked to use the restroom before he had purchased a drink. About two weeks later, at Lake Merritt Park in Oakland, Calif., a white woman called police to report a black family that was grilling food for a picnic.

In both instances, the victims were accused of violating laws or rules governing conduct in commercial establishments and public spaces. In the first case, it was for trespassing or loitering. In the second, it was for using a charcoal grill outside of the designated areas.

“Quality of life” laws serve as a potent instrument of racial segregation. They provide commercial establishments, law enforcement officers and everyday citizens with tools enabling them to police racial boundaries while at the same time claiming to simply be upholding the law.

In contrast to the Jim Crow laws of America’s dark past, these laws supposedly apply to everyone. But in practice, they clearly don’t. Like most middle-aged white people, I have spent countless hours in Starbucks without buying anything. Plenty of white people have barbecued, blasted music and drunk alcohol at that same Oakland park, without anyone calling the police.

The selective enforcement of minor ordinances, as many critics note, performs the same work today that segregation laws did in the past. But it would be inaccurate to call this a new form of Jim Crow. What it is, rather, is a form of Jim Crow that whites in the North have been developing since the early 1900s.

As white segregationists in the South were placing “whites only” signs in the windows of restaurants, in the North, more enlightened (or, rather, more savvy) white proprietors and public officials realized that rules restricting public spaces to local residents and the strict but selective enforcement of laws against things like disorderly conduct and loitering could be used to impose racial segregation.

Take public beaches. In the South, white officials literally drew color lines in the sands and the waters off shore. In the “racially liberal” Northeast, towns devised elaborate, and ostensibly colorblind, procedures for determining who could access public shores, and what they could bring and do once inside, and then proceeded to enforce them for black and brown people only.

In the 1930s, Long Branch, N.J., passed an ordinance requiring all residents to apply for a pass that would allow access to only one of the town’s four public beaches. Town officials claimed the rule was meant to prevent overcrowding. Without exception, though, black applicants were assigned to the same beach and were denied entry to the others.

In the wealthy, all-white towns along the Connecticut Gold Coast, where blacks were effectively excluded from living by racist housing policies, local officials kept public spaces segregated by narrowing the definition of who constituted the public. While nearby urban black populations swelled and the demand for access to public places of recreation spiked, towns like Greenwich, Westport and Fairfield restricted their beaches to residents. It was obvious whom these laws were meant to exclude.

These wealthy enclaves were also among the first to use privatization as a means of segregation, a practice that would proliferate in the decades following the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The Harlem Renaissance novelist Ann Petry once wrote that her “most humiliating Jim Crow experience” took place in Connecticut, where she grew up. She had gone on a trip to a beach with her Sunday school class. The beach was technically private, but that had never mattered — until Petry, the only “colored” girl in the group, came along. On this occasion, the children and their teacher were deemed trespassers and told by a guard, “If you don’t get off the beach, I’ll call up the sheriff.” The children were forced to have their picnic on the church lawn. “We ate,” Petry later wrote, “in a clammy silence.”

The civil rights icon Constance Baker Motley, who grew up in New Haven, Conn., in the 1930s, recalled accompanying two white teenage friends to a private beach in the neighboring town of Milford. Although Motley’s white friends were not members, they went there often. But with an African-American joining them, “there was suddenly a membership requirement.” The three returned to New Haven, Motley dripping in sweat and stewing in indignation, her white friends having learned an important Jim Crow lesson.

Most white Americans prefer to consign such naked acts of discrimination to a shameful past that we have supposedly overcome. But in light of these recent incidents, it would be more accurate to call the forms of Jim Crow that prevailed in the Northeast in the early- to mid-20th century the cutting edge in technologies of exclusion, a sign of things that were to come.

It will take more than sensitivity-training sessions and the public shaming of racist, hypervigilant white women to dismantle today’s system of segregation. Limiting the power of white people to use the law to act out their vision of a “quality” life that excludes black people is a place to start.